The Shadow of Saganami

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The stars outside the armorplast dome were dominated by the huge cloud-swirled blue marble of the planet called Montana. There were fewer ships and orbital constructs circling it than there would have been back home, but Helen had grown accustomed to the sparser traffic here in the Verge. Now she lay sprawled across one comfortable chair, staring at the huge storm system dominating the planet's eastern hemisphere. One of the things spacers missed was the feel and smell of weather, and for someone from Gryphon, where it was always lively (to say the very least), the sense of deprivation sometimes hit hard.

But it wasn't really weather that was bothering her, and she knew it.

The hatch opened with its familiar silent speed, and she looked up quickly, then relaxed.

"How'd it go?" Paulo d'Arezzo asked.

Helen gazed at him thoughtfully, reflecting on how much their relationship had changed over the past month. It was sometimes hard to remember how standoffish she'd thought he was... until she saw him with the other middies. It wasn't the nose-in-the-air sense of superiority she'd once thought it was, but Paulo was an intensely private person. She wondered, sometimes, if anyone else aboard Hexapuma had the least idea about his background and the demons he carried quietly around with him. Even now, she wasn't prepared to ask him, but she thought she knew the answer.

"Better than I expected, in some ways," she said after a moment in response to his question.

"Can you talk about it?"

"They didn't tell me not to, but they didn't tell me I could, either. Under the circumstances, I'd just as soon not, if you don't mind."

"Fine," he said, and she smiled at him. That was something she'd come to appreciate about Paulo. He could ask a question like that without giving the impression he was trying to entice her into telling him something she shouldn't. He was simply asking if she could talk about it, and he was perfectly prepared to talk about something else entirely if she told him she couldn't. Even Aikawa would have looked disappointed if she'd told him no; Paulo didn't.

He dropped into the other chair, propped his heels on the edge of the com console, and dug out his sketch pad. He began to work, and she watched him from her comfortable drape across her own chair.

"Is this the only place on board where you sketch?" she asked several minutes later, into the quiet, companionable sound of soft pencil lead kissing sharp-toothed paper.

"Pretty much," he said, eyes on the pad and his gracefully moving pencil. He paused and glanced up at her with an off-center smile. "It's kind of a private thing for me. I started doing it as much for a sort of therapy as anything else. Now-" He shrugged. "I guess it's kind of like Leo's poetry."

"Leo writes poetry ?" Helen felt both eyebrows rise, and he shook his head with a chuckle.

"You didn't know?"

"No, I certainly didn't!" She looked at him suspiciously. "You're not just pulling my leg to see if it'll come off in your hand, are you?"

"Me? Never!" He chuckled again. "Besides, I understand you're a very dangerous person. Wouldn't be very safe to try pulling your leg, now would it?"

"So how come you know about his poetry and I don't?"

"Far be it from me to suggest that you can sometimes be a bit unobservant," he said, his pencil moving across the paper again. "On the other hand, I sometimes have to wonder where all of your father's sneaky, all-seeing, spymaster genes went, because you sure didn't get any of them!"

"Ha ha, very fu

"Nope."

He looked up with another smile, then returned his attention to his artwork, and she glowered at the top of his head. For somebody who didn't mingle worth a damn, he seemed to do an extraordinarily good job of picking up information. In fact, he seemed to do quite a number of things extraordinarily well in his quiet loner's kind of way.

"Paulo?"

"Yes?" he looked back up, his expression intent, as if some odd note in her voice had alerted him.

"I need some advice."

"I'm not exactly the best person to ask, if it's a social question," he cautioned, with something almost like panic in his eyes.

"You're going to have to get over that rabbit-in-the-headlights reaction to mingling with other people, you know. A successful naval officer doesn't have to be a howling extrovert, I suppose. But a hermit's going to experience a certain difficulty in building sound professional relationships."

"Sure, sure!" He raised his hand, waving his pencil at her admonishingly. "Stop criticizing and ask your question."

"I said I'd prefer not to talk about the meeting, but there was one really weird thing, and I'm not sure what to do about it."

"What do you mean, 'weird'?"

"As we were leaving, Westman asked me if Mr. Van Dort had ever mentioned someone named Suza

"He did what?" Paulo frowned with the expression of someone who knew he didn't have all the information required to understand something. "Why would he do that?"

"I don't know." She turned her eyes away, gazing back out the armorplast at the storm system. "He said I reminded him of someone, then asked me if Mr. Van Dort had ever mentioned her. And I don't think the last name's exactly a coincidence," she added.

"Ba

He sat there for several seconds, frowning at her profile.

"You're worried that he had some kind of ulterior motive for telling you, aren't you?" he asked finally, and she gave an irritated little shrug.

"No, not really... most of the time. But I can't be sure. And even if he doesn't, I've got a strong feeling it might be painful to Mr. Van Dort if I brought it up.

"Well," Paulo said, "it seems to me you've got three options. First, you can keep your mouth shut and never bring the question up. Second, you can ask Van Dort who this Suza

"I'd already pretty much come up with those same options on my own. If you were me, which one would you choose?"

"Without being there and actually hearing what he said to you, I'm not prepared to say," he said thoughtfully. "If you're reasonably certain this isn't simply a case of Westman looking for some way to upset Van Dort or create some kind of suspicion between him and the Skipper-or between him and you, for that matter-then maybe you should just go ahead and ask him. If you're seriously afraid it is a way to make trouble, you should probably tell the Skipper without letting Van Dort know anything about it. Let the Skipper decide the best way to handle it." He shrugged. "Bottom line, Helen, I don't think anyone else can make that decision for you."

"No," she agreed, yet even as she did, she realized just talking to Paulo about it had helped her decide what to do.

"Yes, Helen? What can I do for you?

Bernardus Van Dort laid aside the old-fashioned stylus with which he'd been scribbling longhand notes when the cabin hatch chime sound. He tipped back his chair, smiled, and indicated the small couch on the other side of the cabin he'd been assigned.

Helen settled down and looked at him, wondering one last time if she was doing the right thing. But she'd made her mind up, and she inhaled unobtrusively.

"I hope I'm not out of line, Sir," she said. "But someone suggested that I reminded him of someone called Suza

For just an instant, Van Dort's face froze. All expression vanished, and for that moment, Helen felt as if she were looking at an old-fashioned marble statue. Then he smiled again, but this time the smile was crooked and contained no humor at all.

"Was it Westman? Or Trevor?" His voice was as calm and courteous as ever, yet wrapped around a tension, almost a wariness, she'd never heard from him before.

"It was Mr. Westman," she said steadily, meeting his gaze without flinching, and he nodded.

"I thought it probably was. Trevor and I haven't mentioned Suza

"Sir, if it's none of my business, just tell me so. But when Mr. Westman mentioned her-I don't know. It was as if he really, really wanted me to know and, I think, to ask you about her. And as if his reasons didn't have anything at all to do with the a

"You're wrong about that, Helen," Van Dort looked away at last. He gazed intently at a perfectly bare patch of bulkhead. "It has quite a lot to do with why we're here-why I'm here, at any rate-even if only indirectly."

He was silent for a long time, still gazing at the bulkhead. The blindness in his eyes made Helen regret that she'd begun the entire conversation, but he hadn't bitten her head off or told her to go away. He simply sat there, and she couldn't just leave him wherever he'd wandered to.

"Who was she, Sir?" she asked quietly.

"My wife," he said, very, very softly.

Helen stiffened, her eyes opening wide. She'd never heard that Van Dort had been married. Then again, she thought, she hadn't actually heard anything about his personal life.

Van Dort's eyes finally released the bulkhead and returned to her face. He studied her features, then nodded slowly.

"I see why he told you to ask. You look so much like her. You could be her again, or at least her daughter. That's why I almost refused Captain Terekhov's offer to assign you as my aide. It was too much like how I met her, in many ways."

"Would... would you care to talk about it, Sir?"

"No." He smiled again, wryly. "But that doesn't mean I shouldn't explain it to you, anyway. I probably should've explained it to Baroness Medusa before she asked me to come here, for that matter. I suppose it comes under the heading of 'potential conflicts of interest.'"

She said nothing, only looked at him, and he faced her fully.

"How old do you think I am, Helen?"

"I'm not sure, Sir," she said slowly. "You're obviously first-gen prolong, if you'll pardon my saying so. I guess... sixty T-years?"